Creating campaigns with dynamic, engaging and
personalized content is key to success in email marketing, but is often easier
said than done. Premade templates can serve as a stepping stone for crafting
emails, and Campaigner offers hundreds of standard and responsive designs to
choose from. Today we’re launching our Articles feature to make it even easier
for marketers to craft brand consistent campaigns with customizable elements
within Campaigner’s platform, and in tandem with our templates and Landing Pages.
Articles -- a feature now available for all
users -- give email marketers the ability to create their own design elements
in HTML while ensuring their code remains dynamic and adaptable across all
campaigns. Instead of building components like headers and footers with each
message, Articles allow marketers to easily customize these elements in HTML
and save them for reuse in upcoming messages and campaigns.

The Articles feature is essential for
marketers who need brand consist…

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How to Retain the Holiday Season's Shiny New Subscribers Post-Christmas

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With so
many festive promotions to offer during the holiday season, attracting new
customers from Black Friday through the New Year isn't a problem for most email marketers. The true challenge is getting new subscribers to stick around after
the holiday hype dies down.

After
putting effort into pulling in new customers for the holidays, the key to
long-term success is retaining those new subscribers and fostering a strong
customer relationship. However, the biggest mistake many marketers make in
retention is treating new subscribers like the rest of their contact lists.

Below are a
few tips and best practices to most effectively retain this season’s new
subscribers and turn them into loyal brand advocates:

Hone Your Holiday Tactics

The holiday
season is a great time to prepare new subscribers for a lifetime of happiness
with your brand. Use these first few months to grab their attention and leave a
lasting impression.Consider revamping
your standard welcome message with a personalized seasonal greeting. Holiday
subscribers aren’t your average contacts and shouldn’t be treated as such.
Adding a personalized touch will make a strong first impression and give them
an idea of what a long-term relationship with your brand might look like. Additionally,
make sure your transactional emails are well branded. Holiday subscribers will
likely receive a flood of transactional emails during the season, so make sure
your brand stands out from the rest.

Slow and Steady, Santa

Once you
have these new contacts, be sure to treat them uniquely and avoid approaching them
too aggressively. There should be a “slow and steady” period in your initial
engagement, focused on building rapport rather than overwhelming new contacts
with a blizzard of emails. To build trust and “introduce” your brand to your
new subscribers, send informational content over promotional deals – they’ll
probably be cutting down on the shopping after the holidays anyway. If you
don’t purvey information, send surveys and request feedback on their customer
experience to prove that you appreciate their business. This will ensure your
brand is still top-of-mind without being overbearing.

Re-Gifting Isn’t Always Tacky

Your
contact list will likely double, or even triple, in size between Halloween and the
New Year. Use this as an opportunity to recycle old content. All of your
content will be brand new to holiday subscribers, so they could be a more
receptive audience for campaigns that have some more life left in them. This
will allow you to not only predict which campaigns will garner success (since
you’ve executed on them before), but to also maintain efficiency despite a
flourishing contact list.

Be the Gift that Keeps on Giving

The secret
to retention after the holidays is continuing holiday engagement even after the
holiday season ends. Study your contacts’ engagement with your brand over the
holiday season to leverage upcoming holidays in the New Year. By using
reporting and analysis tools, you can identify what type of product or deal attracted
holiday subscribers to their brand in the first place and use that information
to tailor and personalize deals moving forward. For example, if a man bought a woman’s
necklace around New Years, send him jewelry promotions around Valentine’s Day. Or
if a woman purchased children’s toys for Christmas, deliver toy promotions around
Easter.

Don’t Be a Greedy GrinchSubscribers
earned over the holidays aren’t always long-term wins. As an email marketer,
you should work to build a relationship with new contacts for the first few
months of the New Year, but you may want to taper off if they don’t receive
engagement. Use engagement scoring to determine who is and isn’t nibbling on
the milk and cookies. If they are not interacting with your content, temporarily
suspend them from your mailing lists and wait to re-engage until next Christmas.

Holiday
subscribers can be valuable contacts long after December but only if approached
correctly. Still, even failure in a retention effort can be a lesson that pays
off. Use new subscribers as a testing group—if you lose more than half after
the holidays end, reevaluate your overall email marketing strategy to optimize
for retention. In short, don’t waste the opportunity holiday contacts offer.
Whether they’re naughty or nice, there’s insight to be gained.